“Throwing out the notion of binary happy-or-sad songs, [The EP] opts for something in between, or rather everything at once. Samantha is happy, sad, optimistic, pessimistic, cynical and hopeful within each song… and if you want your art to somehow imitate or represent life then surely that’s the only way to go.”

However, there is one drawback to having strong, literary writing (and a book-heavy music video) – you become a prime target for the Lit Links strand of our Quiet, Constant Friends project. So, I started bugging them by email and, luckily, lead Eric Krewson was more than happy to contribute.

Marilynne Robinson’s Home
by Eric Krewson

Marilynne Robinson is no stranger to success. Her first novel, Housekeeping, won the PEN/Faulkner Award; her second, Gilead, took home the Pulitzer. Even those outside her field have taken notice: President Obama, for example, honored her with a National Humanities Medal and, just two months ago, interviewed her for the New York Review of Books. (That is correct. The President of the United States of America interviewed Robinson, not the other way around.)

And yet, despite these achievements and brushes with fame, despite Faber & Faber recently reprinting Housekeeping as part of its Modern Classic series, Robinson is—by any polling of the public consciousness—largely unknown, unread. My goal is to give a brief primer of her books and, because each differs significantly in tone and content, suggest a starting point for potential readers based on their interests.

Philosophers – Do you spend your days marveling at the world, the seen and unseen? Do you love literature, metaphysics, science, art? Ah then the place to begin is Robinson’s essays, and I suggest the collection The Death of Adam, which includes an illuminating essay—illuminating, especially, for us progressives—about the writings of Charles Darwin. A progressive herself, Robinson muses on the fact that we moderns have rescued Darwin from his own bigotry, rescued him from his own abominable conclusions. From Darwin’s Descent of Man:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes. . . will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasion, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Austrailian or the gorilla.

Dreamers – Do you while away your weekends writing poetry? Do you bore your friends with lines from bards? Do your favorite books collapse the boundaries of time and space, presenting a world that, while anathema to journalistic objectivity, is much more real, much truer than the one reported on the evening news? Well then, Housekeeping and Lila are for you. All of Robinson’s novels are poetic, at times ecstatic, but thanks to luminous female narrators, every page of these books is bathed in mystic light.

Hybrid – Do you enjoy poetry and essays equally? Did you get a B+ or higher in both History and English? We are alike, my friend, and the books most suited for us are Gilead and Home. The latter, my favorite Robinson work, is narrated by Glory Boughton, who is herself both a dreamer and a philosopher. (She is, by profession, a teacher.) In the novel she narrates, Glory has moved home, both to regain her footing after a failed relationship, and to care for her elderly father who has grown impossibly frail since the death of his wife. From the first pages of Home:

Their father said if they could see as God can, in geological time, they would see [the oak] leap out of the ground and turn in the sun and spread its arms and bask in the joys of being an oak tree in Iowa. There had once been four swings suspended from those branches, announcing to the world the fruitfulness of their household. The oak tree flourished still, and of course there had been and there were the apple and cherry and apricot trees, the lilacs and trumpet vines and the day lilies. A few of her mother’s irises managed to bloom. At Easter she and her sisters could still bring in armfuls of flowers, and their father’s eyes would glitter with tears and he would say, “Ah yes, yes,” as if they had brought some memento, these flowers only a pleasant reminder of flowers.

I first read Home in 2008, a few months after my twenty-second birthday. The world economy was bottoming out, and my peers and I were overwhelmed by a very urgent, very real anxiety to find a livelihood where no livelihood existed. We were encouraged to snatch at any flake of subsistence, to wrest it out of the hands of one’s neighbor, if necessary. I had been putting off writing music, which is, if not my calling, certainly my joy, in order to appease this anxiety. Glory spoke to me in reasonable, calm, motherly tones. She taught me that it was OK—even good and right—to stop, to assess. And more importantly, she taught me that it was OK to make art, to say “no” to the zeitgeist and “yes” to my curiosities and convictions. I remember the day I stopped applying to jobs I didn’t want. I wrote a song.

But I still haven’t convinced you to read Robinson? Well then, here is a musical representation of Home, culled from my modest library. Perhaps it will sway you.

You can buy Samantha Says now from The Chairman Dances Bandcamp page.. The Quiet, Constant Friends compilation is available on our Bandcamp page, including the limited edition tape and art print bundle.

The post Lit Links: The Chairman Dances appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Despite the changes in personnel, it seems my original praise applies more than ever. Each track provides an interesting, nuanced narrative of American life. When a band is described as ‘literary’ the first thought is some group of lit students who quote Camus or Kafka or Kerouac, but Field Report aren’t that. They are literary in the sense that their music and writing seems to be on a par with books and poems, their work possessing the relevant weight to become important and meaningful beyond the noisy escapism that typifies much music. Written down this sounds pretentious or grand but the reality is just the opposite. Like the most successful fiction, Porterfield’s writing is humble, real, able to be all shades of sad and beautiful. He leaves it to the listener to decide what they take from it, be it comfort or disturbance.

The album opens with ‘Decision Day’, a song which first appeared on Conrad Plymouth’s great record Comrade Plymouth. The fact that I have heard this song before plays as an advantage. The opening line, “Now the morning was gilded around the edges…” feels like an old friend, a cosy, familiar introduction to the album, a new dawn full of promise, and a portent of good things to come. Next is ‘Home (Leave the Lights On)’, a tale of homesickness, of being in a band and on the road and spending your time pretty much anywhere other than home (note the artwork features two tiny figures separated by a chasm). Porterfield describes the oncoming winter and the woes of a lonely Christmastime with typical eloquence:

“Cold snapped like a coiled spring
you can feel the frost is coming on
we are marigolden – dropping orange and umber,
just barely holding on
and now downtown’s dolled up with tinsel and angels
seasons sneaking up like haircuts, teased apart and tangled”

But there is hope in this song. The chorus of “but leave the lights on cause it might be nighttime when I get there, but I’m on my way home” offers relief from all that longing, or rather transforms it into something precious. Here it becomes clear that Porterfield is talking about a capital-H Home, something more than four walls and a roof, an answer, a solution, a promise that the troubles of the present can and will be solved.

The third song ‘Pale Rider,’ not-so-coincidentally one of the saddest on the record and goes some way to illuminate the other side of this coin. The chorus of “I don’t know that I can be your place to go, or what you need” could be read as either a blow off or a plea for reassurance, and speaks of the pressure of meaning so much to another person, the burden of being this mystical Home in which someone has put so much faith. But even here there is a sincerity that offers a shred of hope, a sense that we are all alone together rather than altogether alone:

“Now the next thing I know, I’m on your back
with a suitcase full of the wrong things packed
we’re out looking for your family but doubling back
to every bar we chose to pass on
now you’re cantering crooked and screaming at the wind
and shooting off flare guns in memory of the kid
his birthday was yesterday; he would have been six
oh my god, I am so sorry.”

One of the main themes of the album is Porterfield’s struggles with alcohol and his newfound sobriety. ‘Cups and Cups,’ ‘Ambrosia’ and ‘Wings’ delve into this idea, pitching alcoholism as the bad present vs. the happy future (Home), with no guarantee of a happy ending for all the struggling. “I keep spinning my wheels,” he sings on ‘Ambrosia,’ “maybe nothing’s gonna change.” Here he comes off like a character from a Denis Johnson story, lost and sad and drunk or wishing to be, crawling from bar to bar knowing that it’s probably killing him or would if given half a chance.

‘Marigolden’ sees a change in tone, a small narrative concerning a fleeing woman and a plane crash. At first this seems out of place amongst the personal nature of the rest of the album, although Porterfield (or whoever the lead male character is throughout) could easily be the “him” in the opening lines (or it could be that she is the Michelle of the next track?). Regardless, the lyrics are wonderful:

“I left Nebraska in my summer dress;
left him behind there to straighten out his head
Jane was working for the airline and she bumped me up to business
she feels the thrill of every liftoff in her heart and chest
She smelled like saffron and glowed gold and rust
years ago, I loved Jane Harmony once
but the fall fell from August and the petals all dropped off
we’re always finding old lives to run away from”

Next up is Michelle, which is a tale of an ill-informed love affair. “Uncle Sam can meet me by the treeline,” he sings. “He and I and your husband we can work it out like men but we won’t end up eye to eye.” You get the sense here that the narrator can sense Home is close or at least halfway possible and it builds up to a frenzy where every idea is a good one, where plans are desperate and exhilarating and of the essence:

“I got five thousand bucks, a full tank of gas,
and a stars and stripes beach towel with a cigarette burn
If we leave right now we’ll be there by morning
there being anywhere but here
we can make a new start; we can make up new names
I’ve already picked yours, Michelle.”

The new start is reflected in ‘Summons,’ where sobriety is a reality, albeit the shaky, edge-of-a-cliff sort of sobriety where it seems the smallest breeze would send him over the precipice and into the drink (quite literally):

“I’ve been two weeks dry, in a bar every night
I’ve been pissing coffee, quinine and lime
and the fog’s been lifting; I’m doing alright
I still can’t look nobody in the eye.”

Closing track ‘Enchantment’ takes the long journey and joins the ends, completing the circle, and making a long journey an endless one. Again opening with images of morning and life (“Easter morning in New Mexico: the Son/sun is risen on another day”), the narrator never actually reaches the Home he had been longing for. Instead the album closes on a curious balance of hope and grief. He’s been sober for a month yet still pining for Home, still on the journey and filling it with loud noises and violent actions in an attempt to make sense of it or at least feel better for a while:

“Now it’s growing wide around us, this feeling in these bones
as we shoot the wind with rifles and then bludgeon it with stones”

I find myself returning to the Denis Johnson comparison. Angels and Jesus’ Son are populated with sad men trying to find something like this Home, then refusing to believe it or else not liking what they see when they get there. Instead they return to the old bars and the new women and the extraordinary promise of an endless search. Whether Porterfield’s character is doomed on these lines is not clear, but if he is then he hasn’t yet grown cynical with it. The closing lines are infused with belief, the marigolden hope that is woven through album.

“The Lord came in the wind and the dirt–
where he sometimes can be found if you
squint; soften it to silhouettes–
His tessellated love is all around”

You can buy Marigolden now via Partisan Records. It is my favourite album of the year.

The post Field Report – Marigolden appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The album is pretty diverse in sound, there are some simple sounding, more stripped back tracks (Earthquake), some manic 100mph tracks (Away) and there are larger, proper rock songs which build to noisy crescendos (Not Quite Dead). The lead’s baritone voice is reminiscent of some recent mediocre British bands (Ox.Eagle.Lion.Man, Editors etc.) but it’s use is much more effective than the Joy Division-esque posturing that is so familiar. I actually quite like Tom Smith’s (from Editors) voice, it could really be used to convey a foreboding, but the Editors’ songs never really utilised it properly. Young Jesus suffer no such worries, for example on ‘Family and Friends’ he uses the vocals to slowly build up to a loss of control comparable to Matt Berninger circa Sad Songs For Dirty Lovers. I’m a sucker for shouty screamy bits in songs, whether it be angry or desperate or cathartic, and Young Jesus deliver.

Home is available now on a pay-what-you-can basis. The temptation to give nothing is large but I’m sure they would appreciate any donation possible.

The post Young Jesus – Home appeared first on Various Small Flames.